Centre for Endangered Archaeology and Heritage

Established in 2022, the Centre builds on decades of work at Leicester on endangered heritage, with a particular focus on North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. The Centre’s work addresses multiple threats to archaeology and heritage: conflict, looting, encroachment, development, lack of planning and lack of law enforcement, and climate change. All these have seen a dramatic increase in scale and severity of threats to heritage in recent decades across many countries. Building capacity and raising awareness on the issues is an important aspect of our vision, alongside monitoring and recording damage. Heritage is critical for creating and contributing to communities’ sense of place, belonging and identity, so enhancing protection is an important means of contributing to stable and more cohesive communities. Heritage is also an important economic driver, especially through global tourism, so heritage protection often has economic value to communities as well. Political and ethical issues also need to be considered and addressed.

Our Vision

The Centre will:

• Support both primary research on archaeology and heritage, and projects focused on impact and capacity building (ie. both pure research and contract work).
• Be a global leader in the field of international heritage protection – combining research projects with impact-focused consultancy work.
• Grow and sustain research income.
• Produce world-leading research outputs relating to the heritage of our areas of study.